Disclaimer: Ripping BluRays with Handbrake is discouraged by its developers. They recommend using MakeMKV instead which is more robust in this respect since it’s built for the task. By now I’ve adopted this workflow myself.

I recently gained a renewed interest in moving my media from discs to hard drives so I can integrate them with my media server. For music and DVDs this is fairly straightforward, although there is a hoop to jump through if you’re on Fedora because it doesn’t come with all the proprietary codecs and whatnot preinstalled. However, all you need to do is get your hands on the RPMFusion repo and install libdvdcss and you’re good.

BluRays, on the other hand, are a bit more involved because their encryption is more complicated. If you’re like me and you want to access those discs on your Linux machine, here’s how:

First you need to install a few libraries. Depending on what distro you’re on these will have different names. On Fedora these are:

  • libaacs
  • libbluray
  • libbluray-bdj
  • libbdplus

On Ubuntu the first two are called libaacs0 and libbluray2, I think, but I’m not quite sure. The point is, you might need to figure out the exact name of the libraries yourself but it shouldn’t be too difficult.

The other thing you need is the database with the AACS keys which can be downloaded from here. Choose the one for the appropriate language, extract it and put the file into the ~/.config/aacs folder (which you will probably have to create first). Rename the file into KEYDB.cfg (because capitalization is important!) and you’re done. You should now be able to watch the BluRay (e.g. with VLC) or rip it with Handbrake (which is what I’m doing). If the database doesn’t have a key for your disc it might be too new and you can try again by redownloading the database at a later date.

Side note: you might be aware of MakeMKV which can rip BluRays without the setup. However, this is proprietary and also doesn’t give you as much control over the transcoding process etc. so I prefer it this way.